The first conclusions of the Australian Research Council were positive about homeopathy. As a result, known anti-homeopathy members of the Council squashed the report and then released a very negative report.

You can positively deal with this outrage now and get the Australian Government and Council (NHMRC) to release the first report. Releasethefirstreport.com is a web site you can go to make your voice heard and read about the whole controversy.

The Society of Homeopaths in the United Kingdom reports: “Homeopaths in Australia have launched a global campaign calling on the government there to publish the first version of a review of homeopathy which they claim was deliberately ‘buried’.

The existence of the first report only came to light through a Freedom of Information request (FoI), although its contents have not been published. Campaigners say that the decision to suppress it and use a different methodology for the second review raises serious questions.

Justifying its decision not to publish the first report, NHMRC said its quality was poor, despite the research being carried out by the scientist who had written the council’s own guidelines on conducting evidence reviews.

The new campaign, Releasethefirstreport.com, is calling for the publication of the original, publicly-funded review in the name of transparency and to give the public access to all available evidence about homeopathy ‘so that they can make informed choices about their healthcare’.

An earlier Your Health, Your Choice campaign which highlighted the ‘flaws’ in the published report and drew public attention to the need to protect access to complementary and alternative medicines in Australia, led to 87,000 people signing a petition.

The anti-homeopathy report published by the Australian Research Council has been questioned by their scientific experts and others. The HRI make some impressive points and bring up significant doubts about the report’s validity which have yet to be addressed by the Australian Council.

NHMRC did the homeopathy review twice, producing two reports, one in July 2012 and the one released to the public in March 2015.

The existence of the first report has never been disclosed to the public – it was only discovered through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

NHMRC say they rejected the first report because it was poor quality despite it being undertaken by a reputable scientist and author of NHMRC’s own guidelines on how to conduct evidence reviews.

FOI requests have revealed that a member of NHMRC’s expert committee overseeing the review process – Professor Fred Mendelsohn – confirmed the first review to be high quality saying – “I am impressed by the rigor, thoroughness and systematic approach given to this evaluation [….] Overall, a lot of excellent work has gone into this review and the results are presented in a systematic, unbiased and convincing manner.”

NHMRC said the results of the second report published in 2015 were based on a “rigorous assessment of over 1800 studies”. In fact results were based on only 176 studies.

NHMRC used a method that has never been used in any other review, before or since. NHMRC decided that for trials to be ‘reliable’ they had to have at least 150 participants and reach an unusually high threshold for quality. This is despite the fact that NHMRC itself routinely conducts studies with less than 150 participants.

These unprecedented and arbitrary rules meant the results of 171 of the trials were completely disregarded as being ‘unreliable’ leavingonly 5 trials NHMRC considered to be ‘reliable’. As they assessed all 5 of these trials as negative, this explains how NHMRC could conclude that there was no ‘reliable’ evidence.

Professor Peter Brooks, Chair of the NHMRC committee that conducted the 2015 review, signed conflict of interest formdeclaring he was not “affiliated or associated with any organisation whose interests are either aligned with or opposed to homeopathy”,despite being a member of anti-homeopathy lobby group ‘Friends of Science in Medicine’

NHMRC’s guidelines state that such committees must include experts on the topic being reviewed, yet there was not one homeopathy expert on this committee.

Public health expert, Dana Ullman has written an article on Mercola.com that is critical of the United States Food and Drug Agency for going after homeopathic remedies instead of dealing with the pharmaceutical industry’s serious problems.

On this web site we have written a number of articles on how the pharmaceutical industry and medical industry attacks homeopathy to deflect the dangerous effects of pharmaceutical drugs. Even though homeopathy has a remarkable 200 year history of safety, the FDA, which is supposed to deal with these issues, is doing the same. This is to deflect its inability to deal with pressing issues that are causing serious harm and death such as the opioid crisis and conventional pharmacuetical drugs that have caused thousands of serious side effects including death for those taking them. Since homeopathic remedies have such a profound history of safety, (especially relative to the pharmaceutical industry), the only way they can create more regulations for homeopathic remedies is to judge that homeopathic remedies “might” cause problems.

Dana Ullman, MPH, Masters of Public Health says:

The FDA does not have a history of going after any Big Pharma company on the grounds that a drug “might” cause problems (some potential problems of the FDA prohibiting access to certain homeopathic medicines based on theoretical grounds are discussed later in this article). The previous FDA guidelines have been in use since 1988, and these guidelines provide specificity as to how homeopathic medicines can be marketed and sold.
In contrast, the new guidelines seem to allow the FDA to provide enforcement based on a vague and undefined “risk/benefit” that could change from one year or decade to another. Further, homeopathic medicines have an impressive record of safety, with relatively rare exceptions.

A public university in Quebec Canada called McGill University and a professor there named Joe Schwarcz received millions of dollars of funding by the head of a pharmaceutical company. It was to scientifically “investigate homeopathy”. By giving the money to a public institution it was therefore tax deductible.

This head of the pharmaceutical company, also funds other anti homeopathy skeptic groups. Mr. Scwarcz was a known skeptic and opponent of homeopathy and of course a fair and scientific investigation by him from the outset was impossible.

In fact, it appears no real scientific investigation has taken place. Instead Mr. Scwarcz continued to attack homeopathy (which he was doing before) and even took out ads in major Canadian newspapers to increase the newly funded attack. He espouses that pharmaceutical medicine is the only scientific medicine.

Mr. Scwarcz has made sure that no one finds out that one of the leading research chemists and scientists was so impressed with homeopathy that he decided to study it. Dr Lionel R Milgrom BSc, MSc, PhD, CChem, FRSC, LCH, MARH, RHom. is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and his research and articles are highly cited in leading science journals. Dr. Migrom expertly and persuasively contends that there is a definitive scientific basis for homeopathy. He joins many other professors, researchers, scientists as well as highly trained medical doctors and specialists who are very pro-homeopathy.

Media outlets have not contacted any of the multitude of these scientists and researchers to get a pro-homeopathy comment. Instead, Mr. Scwarcz and his cohorts have, with deep pockets, dominated the media discussion on homeopathy.

With the most recent pharmaceutical industry sourced funding going to the University of McGill the question that is being asked is- ‘Is a Canadian public institution therefore supporting and sponsoring attacks on Homeopathy?’

The Lancet, a medical journal here in the UK, has published a study concerning heart stents. Half the participants received a surgical procedure with a stent installed but then half got a “placebo” surgical procedure and in the end, did not get the heart stent put in. The results showed that both those with a stent and those without continued to experience angina heart pain after the procedure.

The study is problematic on two counts. First, tens of thousands of patients have procedures where stents are put in with the idea that it will reduce heart pain and now it is found that putting in a stent is all but useless for that.

Second, ethically, The Lancet gave approval to this study where there were serious complications from a “placebo” surgery, but surgery none the less. As the study said: “Serious adverse events included four pressure-wire related complications in the placebo group, which required PCI, and five major bleeding events, including two in the PCI group and three in the placebo group.”

In contradistinction, Homeopathy has an over 200 year record of safety and efficacy. And the pharmaceutical, medical industry represented by The Lancet is in a fight against safe and effective homeopathy. The Lancet published a poorly cobbled together study on homeopathy, knowing the author was biased against homeopathy and the study poorly done. Experts have called the study a sham but Lancet continues its fight against safe homeopathy and supports dangerous procedures to show that double blind studies are the only arbiter of efficacy.

With Homeopathy having very positive clinical results, popularity and an increase in its market share in emerging economies the medical industry had a great fear. As a result, the conventional pharmaceutical industry started a subterfuge campaign against homeopathy stating it was unscientific and therefore more dangerous than conventional medical drugs and procedures. This was without any real substantiation. They would have you believe that it is more dangerous to take a homeopathic remedy than to get surgery. And obviously it has come to the place where the standard of care for The Lancet medical journal is surgery over safe alternatives, even sham surgery that injures.

At the end of the new documentary on homeopathy “Just One Drop,” there is a section on the 2015 study about the scientific validity of homeopathy done by The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. The Research Council published a negative conclusion that got world wide press.

As reported in the documentary, a subsequent investigation done by an Australian individual and other Australian homeopathy groups showed that the Council’s researchers involved in this study were terribly biased and even lied about their impartiality. The initial chair of the study was a leading outspoken skeptic of homeopathy.

At first, an impartial company with a group of researchers were fired by the Council when they presented a report that concluded that homeopathy was effective. Then the subsequent research group, under the Council’s direct guidance, created criteria for evaluating studies of homeopathy that were never used before in the evaluation of other scientific studies. This unprecedented procedure effectively blocked all studies of homeopathy that had a positive result. In response, one of the researchers interviewed on camera belligerently justified these actions by claiming ‘it was homeopathy!’ they were evaluating.

There are many dramatically positive scientific studies validating homeopathy’s effectiveness and none of these were included in their report. Many are described on this web site.

Even though there have been many complaints to the Research Council, after 2 years, there is still no substantial results of their supposed review of the lack of integrity and dishonesty by their own researchers. For more detailed information see the documentary Just One Drop.

A new film on homeopathy has been released by Laurel Chiten (Blind Dog FIlms) who is the Producer and Director. “Just One Drop” explores the people who have been dramatically helped by homeopathy as well as the history and controversy of homeopathy.